Huawei, ZTE see vindication amid US cyber-spying scandal
US lawmakers say Huawei poses a threat to national security.
Revelations made by whistle-blower Edward Snowden about internet
surveillance in the United States may have provided an "I told you so"
moment for China's telecommunications equipment makers.
A senior spokesman for Shenzhen-based Huawei Technologies, the mainland's
biggest telecommunications equipment manufacturer, pointed out that not one
company in its industry was among the high-technology companies alleged by
Snowden to be co-operating with the US government's Prism surveillance
programme and other online snooping activities.
"Why? Because equipment vendors build the 'pipes' that form the network, but
they do not manage the information that flows through the network or that is
stored in data reservoirs, like internet company servers," William Plummer,
a vice-president of external affairs at Huawei and its point man in
Washington, told the South China Morning Post.
On the alleged systematic compromise of online user data with firms like
Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Yahoo, Plummer said: "It didn't matter which
combination of [telecommunications equipment] vendors built the pipes and
plumbing of the networks over which the data extracted had flowed. It would
have made no difference in terms of the security of the data."
He added that this development "would seem to suggest that some of the
cyber-security solutions that have been proposed in the US, such as blocking
equipment from China-headquartered telecommunications gear vendors, are as
much about politics and protectionism as anything else".
Both Huawei and ZTE, the world's second and fifth-biggest telecommunications
equipment suppliers, are the target of scrutiny in the US, where lawmakers
have branded their network infrastructure products as posing a threat to
national security.
Following an 11-month investigation, the bipartisan Intelligence Committee
of the House of Representatives released a 52-page report in October last
year which recommended Huawei and ZTE be barred from acquiring US assets and
from supplying any equipment to telecommunications network projects there
for fear of possible spying and cyberattacks by China.
Huawei and ZTE rejected those findings, which singled them out even though
every major telecommunications infrastructure provider has a substantial
manufacturing supply chain in China.
In April, the US Government Accountability Office released a new report that
found no recent evidence of cyber-security incidents affecting the country's
telecommunications networks - a finding that directly refutes the stand
taken by the lawmakers in the October study.
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